LONDON, September 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The European IT industry is rapidly embracing Business Service Management (BSM), the software solution that provides organisations with a real-time and holistic view of the impact IT outages have on critical business services, a new survey has revealed.

Almost 83% of respondents in the survey, conducted by global IT Service Management software supplier Axios Systems (www.axiossystems.com) and the Help Desk Institute Europe, said they had an understanding of BSM, which helps organisations set priorities from the business, rather than just the IT, point of view.

Only 14% said they had no understanding of BSM, with the remainder unsure.

"This is a very encouraging trend," said Neil Whyte, Solutions Alliance Manager with Axios Systems. "A year or two ago Business Service Management was regarded as a very new concept. Now awareness is rising fast as the market realises the enormous benefits which it offers."

In the poll of almost 300 IT support professionals, some 20% named BSM as their top spending priority for the coming year - roughly the same figure as for Best Practice and ITSM solutions.

"BSM is already a significant driver in spending and high up on people's budget lists, " Whyte continued. "This should not be surprising since it is an excellent example of aligning IT with the business."

He said BSM centred on visualising the impact of any IT outage, from the points of view of the customer and financial implications. It not only provided organisations with a holistic view of their IT and business services but also aided effective prioritisation of support resources to the areas of the business that needed it most when IT services failed.

Axios Systems recently launched assystBSM, the world's first IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process-driven software solution for Business Service Management. This enables organisations to implement a low maintenance approach to BSM, making it simple to acquire the events, metrics and other key performance indicators for the components that underpin business services.

The fundamental difference in this new approach to BSM is that there is a real-time link to the underlying Configuration Management Database (CMDB) which drives the IT Service Management solution, following ITIL's guidelines for effective Asset and Configuration Management - the foundation of Best Practice IT Service Management.

Reiterating the drive in the industry towards the alignment of IT and business, Gartner, Inc, stated in a recent report(1): "The end-to-end IT service and support that will be required of the IT service desk and other IT operations will be better measured by new, more business-oriented metrics.

(1) Gartner Research "CIOs need better IT service and support metrics" - Kris Brittain, VP Research

About Axios Systems

Axios Systems (www.axiossystems.com) is a leading provider of Best Practice-based consolidated IT Service Management software solutions. Axios' customer-centric approach combined with its leading integrated technology framework ensures customers worldwide can align their service and support organizations with the overall goals of the business.

Benefiting from over 17 years of product development and investment around Best Practice principles, Axios' core solution, assyst, intuitively steers users through the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes. Axios Systems' commitment to Best Practice is further demonstrated through being first to achieve BS 15000 certification - the world's first formal standard for IT Service Management.

Axios Systems is headquartered in the UK with offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Markos Symeonides, Axios Systems, +44-(0)131-220-4748, markos.symeonides@axiossystems.com